Betty Gates' Pickles - A recipe card brings back memories...

 My small backyard garden is just about done for the year.  It produced again too many tomatoes, and not enough of anything else.  This year my husband, in an effort to use up some of these tomatoes, actually cooked and canned enough sauce to last us the winter.  Our cucumbers didn't do well; they were yellow and soft.  My sister's garden on the Cape, however, produced an abundant crop of cucumbers.  During a recent conversation we discovered that we had both recently looked into our grandmother's recipe files and pulled out handwritten recipes for Betty Gates' Pickles.  

My grandmother made a lot of wonderful homemade goods which I recall with great love and affection.  Homemade pickles wasn't one of those items I particularly cared for.  I recall always being a little disappointed at homemade pickles not being as tasty and sharp as those found in a grocery store jar. But I was a kid, and now am much more interested in the "real" and "natural" things we used to make and eat at home.  The recipe though did remind me of "Aunt Betty" my grandmother's friend.  I remember her visiting at my grandparents' house on Long Pond in Yarmouth, and Aunt Betty was kind and sweet.  She was such a good friend of my grandmother's that I remember visiting her in Connecticut where she lived.  We didn't visit many others off Cape, at least not that I recall.  Aunt Betty was not a blood relation, so who was she?  


My grandmother Harriet (Nelson) Morgan is pictured above leaning on the tree.  Her sister Estelle, or "Kewpie" as she was called, is next to her in the kerchief.  I cannot name the woman on the left with the barrette in her hair but she is familiar to me in memory.  Betty is the taller woman between the barretted woman and my grandmother.  Given what I know and what I have discovered about my grandmother, her sister, and Betty, I believe they are probably posing at the Methodist Camps in Yarmouth, Massachusetts. 

Betty Gates was not originally from Yarmouth.  She was born Mary Elizabeth Stuart on 20 February 1912 in Iowa to Reverend Robert Lee Stuart, a former Methodist Pastor in Humbolt, Iowa, and President of Taylor University in Indiana, and his wife Josie Conner (both originally of Virginia).  Betty married Jo Bernard Gates, a Methodist minister of South Yarmouth on 29 May 1935 at Taylor University in Indiana.  Betty's husband was himself the son of a Methodist minister. (Interestingly, Betty's father and mother were both children of ministers.) The fathers of both the bride and groom - Reverend Edwin Lee Gates and Reverend Doctor Stuart jointly officiated at the wedding.  The wedding breakfast was held at Betty's parents who were living at Taylor University as Doctor Stuart was serving as President. Apparently Betty and her new husband Reverend Gates both attended the University and at the time of the wedding, Betty was attending graduate studies in piano and organ music.  The couple was to reside in South Yarmouth after the wedding trip.

By 1940 the couple and an infant daughter had moved on to Fall River. But apparently from 1935 to 1940 my grandmother and Betty became fast friends.  Sometime before 1950 the Gates family moved on to Connecticut where Betty's husband served as chaplain and ultimately as superintendent at a state penitentiary. (The Gates Correctional Facility in Connecticut is named for him.)  From Betty's obituary, it seems Betty was an active and civic minded woman - she was a school librarian in several schools, a cheerleading coach, retiring in the 1970's; she also served as a deaconess of the First Church of Christ.  She participated in several garden clubs and historical societies.  Betty and her husband divorced in 1981. Betty died in 1994 at age 82, leaving a daughter and grandchildren. 

I think we'll try Betty Gates' pickle recipe, and while we make them, and while we taste them, sit back and remember Aunt Betty and my grandmother sitting at the kitchen table in my grandmother's house, serenely drinking tea and looking out the bay window at Long Pond looking comfortable in their friendship.


Sources:

Elizabeth Gates; was school librarian, Hartford Courant, Hartford, Connecticut, 03 May 1994, p. 75, N
Newspapers.com.

Daughter of Former Humbolt Minister Was Married May 29, The Humbolt Republican, Humbolt, Iowa, 07 June 1935, page 4, Newspapers.com.

Mary Elizabeth Stuart, Delayed Births Records, 1911-1913, Iowa, U.S., Births (Series) 1880-1904, 1921-1944, and Delayed Births 1856-1904, Ancestry.com. 

Floyd County Marriages, Miss Josie Lena, The Roanoke Times, Roanoke Virginia, March 28, 1908, Newspapers.com.

Rev. J.B. Gates, Dies, Was Corrections Leader, Hartford Courant, Hartford, Connecticut, 5 October 1981, page 24, Newspapers.com.


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